What the largest 401(k) plans hold, and who they hired and fired.
PlanOptica is plan analytics for advisors and brokers. It makes every public Form 5500 retirement and welfare filing searchable, and now reads the fund lineup of each large plan line by line. Every figure on this page links back to the filing it came from.
Press contact: hello@planoptica.com
The dataset in numbers
Holdings data updated Nov 6, 2026. Numbers on this page update with each publish.
Three stories from the data
1. Hired and Fired: the fund manager league table
Which fund managers 51,808 large 401(k) and 403(b) plans added and removed between their 2024 and 2025 filings. Fidelity had the most net plan gains (+2,207). T. Rowe Price had the most net losses (-733). Vanguard had the largest net dollar outflow (-$23.2B).
2. Recordkeepers' own funds
The recordkeeper runs the plan's accounts. Many also manage funds. In plans that Vanguard recordkeeps, 82% of fund dollars sit in Vanguard funds. The table shows the largest recordkeepers by plan count, defined contribution plans only.
| Recordkeeper | Plans | In its own funds |
|---|---|---|
| Vanguard | 2,719 | 82% |
| TIAA (Nuveen) | 1,451 | 48% |
| Fidelity (FMR) | 11,761 | 33% |
| Principal | 6,272 | 24% |
| John Hancock (Manulife) | 2,960 | 11% |
| Transamerica (Aegon) | 2,057 | 5% |
| Empower | 9,398 | 3% |
| ADP | 3,060 | 0% |
Own funds: fund dollars whose manager is the recordkeeper's company, matched by firm name, weighted by each plan's fund dollars. Plans where the recordkeeper is the sponsor's own firm are left out. A high share is not a finding of wrongdoing: many sponsors choose these funds on purpose.
3. Target-date breakups
The target-date fund is the default for most new savers, so it is the biggest single decision in a plan. 1,432 plans moved their series to another manager, $43.4B in all. Capital Group won the most, a net 273 plans.
- Salesforce 401(k) Plan: $4.35B from JPMorgan to Capital Group
- Keurig Dr Pepper 401(k) Plan: $1.36B from Vanguard to State Street
- The Estee Lauder Companies 401(k) Savings Plan: $1.28B from JPMorgan to State Street
- Andersen 401(k) Plan: $957M from Vanguard to BlackRock
Method
- Source: Form 5500 annual reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor (EBSA), public data. Fund lineups come from Schedule H line 4i, the schedule of assets held for investment, which plans with 100 or more participants file.
- PlanOptica reads each line, matches it to a fund and its parent manager, and compares each plan's two newest filed years. Share-class changes, same-manager moves to a collective trust, renames and changes under $250K or 0.1% of the plan do not count as hires or firings.
- Coverage is the large plans that file a full lineup. It is not the whole market. Matches use the names in the filing; a few funds have no named manager.
- The full method and caveats are on the Hired and Fired report. Corrections to hello@planoptica.com.
Logo and screenshots
Free to use with coverage of PlanOptica. Credit: PlanOptica, from DOL Form 5500 filings.
About PlanOptica
PlanOptica is plan analytics for advisors and brokers: every retirement and welfare filing in the country, peer-ranked and a decade deep, sourced to the line. Advisors, brokers and asset managers use it to find plans, read their lineups and fees, and track who changed what. More about PlanOptica.
Contact: hello@planoptica.com